MANHATTAN (CN) — After federal prosecutors rested their corruption case against Senator Robert Menendez last Friday, the New Jersey Democrat on Monday began mounting his own case to the New York jury.
It was a family affair in the Manhattan federal courthouse, with Menendez’s lawyers calling the embattled senator’s older sister to testify as the first defense witness.
Caridad Gonzalez, a Cuba-born 80-year-old who is 11 years Menendez’s senior, nostalgically recalled helping raise Menendez after their family left Cuba to escape local authorities in the 1950s.
Testifying on behalf of her “baby brother” — who is on trial for federal bribery charges after investigators found 13 gold bars and about $480,000 in cash in his New Jersey home — Gonzalez told the court that stashing cash around the house is normal for Cubans like them.
A distrust in banks was ingrained in their family because of their upbring, Gonzalez said. She recalled a time when her father, a necktie maker in Havana, stashed cash in the “false bottom” of a grandfather clock at their house.
“It’s a Cuban thing, it’s normal,” Gonzalez said. “They were afraid of losing what they worked so hard for because in Cuba they took everything away.”
Gonzalez told the court that her family had a “perfect” life in Cuba until her father ran into trouble with local police for refusing to shut down his necktie manufacturing facility. When cops eventually raided their home, Gonzalez said the money in the grandfather clock remained safe and sound.
Hidden cash in the family home was the only asset Menendez’s parents were able to bring when they fled to the United States in 1951, Gonzalez said Monday. The senator was born three years later in Manhattan, but Gonzalez insisted that the family habit of storing large amounts of money at home stuck with him anyway.
The testimony is part of a broader effort from Menendez’s defense attorneys to normalize the massive amount of money investigators found in his home last year — much of it stuffed in clothing embroidered with the senator’s name.
Menendez is standing trial on 16 federal bribery charges. He is accused of conspiring with his wife, Nadine, to secretly accept gold bars, cash and other luxury gifts from wealthy businessmen in exchange for legislative favors that benefited the Egyptian and Qatari governments. Prior to his 2023 indictment, Menendez was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Nadine is a co-defendant in the case, but isn’t currently on trial. Her trial is delayed indefinitely as she tends to a serious medical issue: Grade 3 breast cancer, according to a statement from Menendez's office.
But Nadine’s sister, Katia Tabourian, also made an appearance in court on Monday to testify for the defense. Taking the witness stand after Gonzalez, Tabourian praised Menendez’s old fashioned manners and treatment of her sister, to the point that it appeared to mildly irritate U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein.
“He is amazing. Every time she gets up at a dinner or a lunch, he would stand up,” Tabourian said. “Very respectful, very kind.”
“Okay, thank you,” Stein said, cutting her off.
Tabourian testified that Nadine, too, had a habit of stashing valuables at home, rather than at a bank, because of her Lebanese heritage.
“Everybody had a safe,” Tabourian said, a reference to the safe found in Nadine’s closet.
Throughout the trial, Menendez’s lawyers have tried to distance the senator from his wife, repeatedly insisting that Nadine took the bribes — including the gold bars and payments on a Mercedes-Benz convertible — without Menendez’s knowledge and stored them in her closet safe.
Menendez’s attorneys wanted to drive that point home further with Tabourian’s testimony. Last week, they asked the judge if they could elicit testimony from her about Nadine’s past relationship with an abusive ex-boyfriend, which supposedly continued even while she was married to the senator.
They hoped that such testimony would help prove that Menendez and Nadine lived very separate lives, and that the senator couldn’t have been able to work in tandem with his wife to the extent that prosecutors suggest.
But Stein declined to let the defense lawyers dig deep into that topic, fearing that the details could prejudice the prosecutors and turn his courtroom into a “soap opera.” The attorneys tread lightly around the issue on Monday, asking Tabourian only broad questions about Nadine’s prior relationship resurfacing during her marriage with Menendez.
“That was creating a lot of chaos in her relationship with the senator,” Tabourian said. "I know that he, I think, was fed up with the previous relationship constantly coming in between [them].”
Prosecutors hold that Menendez frequently checked his wife’s location with the “Find My Friends” iPhone app, and regularly checked in for updates on errands. They rested their case on Friday after roughly six weeks of witness testimony.
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